Diversification of various contents and growth of high-volume contents, such as High Definition (HD) contents and Ultra High Definition (UHD) contents in communication systems are increasingly intensifying data congestion. This situation causes content sent from a sender (e.g., host A) to be abnormally delivered to a receiver (e.g., host B) and some of the content to be lost on a route.
In general, data is transmitted in packets and so, the content loss occurs in packets. The packet is comprised of a block of data for transmission (payload), address information (e.g., sender address, destination address), and control information (e.g., header). Accordingly, if a packet loss occurs in a network, the receiver may not be able to receive the lost packet and thus, may not know of data and control information in the lost packet. This causes various inconveniences to the user, such as deterioration of audio quality, deterioration of video quality or screen freeze, subtitle missing, file loss, etc.
For this reason, to repair the data loss that has occurred in the network, Application Layer Forward Error Correction (AL-FEC) is required, and for this, a method to reconstruct and transmit or receive FEC packets is required.
Meanwhile, as convergence of broadcasting and communication proceeds, multimedia services through various media are becoming common. In other words, the service using the existing broadcasting media, such as terrestrial, satellite, cable, etc., is digitally diversified and at the same time, mobile broadcasting services, such as Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (DMB), Digital Video Broadcasting-Handheld (DVB-H) and Advanced Television Systems Committee-Mobile/Handheld (ATSC-M/H), etc., and convergent services like Internet Protocol TV (IPTV) and smart TV are emerging. Furthermore, preparation for ATSC 3.0 standards is discussed recently, and a need exists for technologies to provide optimal services adaptive to various terminals and varying channel conditions in hybrid network environments of broadcasting network and the Internet.